This Chair is Just Right: The Case for Collaborative Authoring

It's clear that neither individual authoring paradigms nor LCMS models fit the needs of a modern development team. The first offers speed, engaging content, ease of use, simple integration, and nearly immediate business impact. Unfortunately, it does nothing to make team-based development more efficient or productive. LCMS, to the contrary, do offer many collaborative features. Even absent reuse and workflow, LCMS solutions have many features that enable teams to work more effectively together. Simply enabling multiple team members to work on different pages of the same course at the same time is a major improvement over single-user development models. Unfortunately, in supporting a team-based model, LCMS solutions sacrifice nearly all of the key benefits of a singleton approach: speed, engaging content, ease of use, simple integration, and immediate delivery of value.

What is required is a solution that solves the challenges of team-based authoring without all of the overhead of an LCMS. What we need is a solution with all of the sophistication of an advanced individual authoring tool, but with groupware features, asset management, an ability to repurpose and recycle, and some level of task and defect management. What we need is collaborative authoring.

A collaborative authoring solution keeps the focus on the key element in any development process - authoring. Unlike LCMS solutions that add layers of management functionality at the expense of engaging content and sophisticated development interfaces, a collaborative authoring tool would be, first and foremost, an authoring tool with standard, rapid course authoring features that would ensure flexibility in development and sophistication of the learning outputs, features such as:

PowerPoint import
PowerPoint-like transition effects in a course at both object and page level
Deep themes and object inheritance to ensure consistency across projects
Separation of graphical themes from content so that as objects are reused development teams can avoid the "Frankenstein-course" effect
Pre-designed interactions like drag and drop, glossary terms, and rollovers that can be dropped onto a page
Easy integration points for Flash, video, audio, graphics etc.
Pre-designed integration points for interactive content designed outside the tool - elements like simulations or interactivity models
Sophisticated assessments, including randomization of test questions and dynamic assembly of mastery assessments
An ability to create or integrate eLearning games
Standard adherence, including the latest version of SCORM and PENS

These authoring features should be the primary feature-set of the tool and should continue to evolve as standards change. In particular, the solution must evolve to support gaming models, sophisticated branching, and deeper, richer integration with niche tools that are built outside the core authoring tool. Ensuring that these interaction elements can be easily added and tracked will be a critical element of any long-term content strategy.

While these cornerstone content development features are central to the toolset, what will truly differentiate a collaborative authoring solution is its ability to support development teams of any size in robust new ways that drive greater efficiency and productivity. In particular, the ability of a solution to scale as development teams mature would be of great value to almost every corporate learning team.

Today, organizations typically start out with an individual authoring tool, usually for two reasons: 1) team size when starting eLearning is initially small, as it's usually an initiative-based project that kicks off an eLearning migration, 2) if eLearning is not yet fully tested as a training option internally, there is rarely enough confidence to warrant more significant investment. As successes mount, however, this can rapidly change. Other tactical groups might try to replicate the initial success and buy their own tools. The organization may decide to make some higher level investments in additional tools, like Firefly or Raptivity, or services, such as outsourced content development. At some point, there is enough production volume and enough perceived value that an organization decides to standardize on a single platform and content management strategy.

The problem with this typical approach is that it's widely inefficient and wasteful. From the moment another team buys and begins using a second set of tools or even the same set of tools, but in parallel, the organization is wasting money. When the organization makes the full cut-over to an enterprise system, there is colossal waste. None of the content that is developed in individual authoring tools can be imported or used as source material in an LCMS. At best, the content can be treated as a black box SCORM object, but the team can't edit it, deconstruct it, or change it. All of that would still need to happen in the original tool. At that moment of cutover, therefore, the organization commits itself to tremendous levels of rework and the recognition of significant loss in its previous eLearning investments.

Imagine instead a toolset that could be used by an individual developer in a similar fashion to how he or she might use Lectora or Toolbook today. But then as new teams or team members are added, they don't get their own locally running tool; instead, they simply get log-ins to a Web- or server-based tool that is already filled with projects and course pages and media assets that the first team created. As additional teams and team members are added, even internationally, they too would benefit from the work that preceded them. In this model, there is no "big bang" cutover where all of the previous work is abandoned; there is no inefficient, parallel development that happens in isolated silos. Instead, as the organization matures and adds capability, the efficiency and productivity of the whole organization scales geometrically without experiencing a precipitous productivity drop in the transition between individual authoring models and LCMS solutions, or a multi-year wait for ROI to materialize.

Another key benefit of collaborative authoring tools is the ability to provide for the unique needs of the organization at each stage of its content development maturity. Chris Howard of Bersin & Associates has tried to quantify the various stages of development maturity through which eLearning teams pass. He found that eLearning development teams typically evolve to one of three distinct levels of development maturity: content authoring, team collaboration, and enterprise content management. What Howard found is that the needs of these groups vary greatly. Groups at the content authoring level primary need authoring tools that match their skill set and can produce content rapidly in support of tactical initiatives. Groups at a team collaboration level need both authoring and collaboration features, particularly features that lead to greater efficiency such as asset recycling, templates, and a content repository. Groups at an enterprise content management level are typically looking for ways to more directly leverage content from external supplies and to further streamline through the use of SCORM objects and cross-enterprise access.

To date, organizations have looked to different sets of tools for each need, resulting in severe transition pain between stages. With a collaborative authoring tool, the needs of each stage could easily be met. If the solution was, first and foremost, an authoring solution that included the same rapid development features that course authors have come to expect, it could easily meet the needs of the content-focused teams.

In turn, the collaborative aspects of the tool would solve the needs at the next level, collaborative authoring: centralized storage of media assets, templates, and content that would address a significant portion of the challenges faced by such teams. But beyond these features, a collaborative authoring tool should also enable parallel development within the same project as well as deep integration of reviewers and project managers who oversee and QA projects. With these additional features, collaborative authoring tools would be a natural fit for teams.

Lastly, enterprise content management needs could be met through a centralized, Web-server based product that could be used from any Web-enabled computer. In this model, all of the central assets would be available to any team member anywhere in the world. This would further enable external suppliers and even offshore, outsourced team members to contribute to the central repository, thereby leveraging their work more fully across the enterprise. Add to this support for SCORM and a wide variety of external media, and the solution would solve a significant portion of the needs at the enterprise level as well. In short, a well-designed collaborative authoring tool could seamlessly provide value as an organization grows and matures over time without the associated costs of making massive transitions between fundamentally different development models.

Given the above, it's clear that collaborative authoring tools must include a significant number of groupware features to streamline team-based development while also supporting enterprise content management initiatives. Below is a list that might provide the right mix of integration and groupware features:

Storyboarding
Centralized asset management
Learning object repurposing
Module and course repurposing
Task tracking and reporting
Defect tracking and reporting
Simple integration with advanced third party media or interactions
An integrated SME interface or process
Built-in review process that can be used by non-technical resources
Built-in templates and ability to create custom templates
Simple, standards-based integration with LMS
Infinite scale for authors to work in parallel on the same project at the same time

A collaborative authoring tool should support teams of any size and evolve as the team evolves. Part of this should include licensing flexibility in supporting concurrent non-developer roles (SME, QA, project manager), possibly including free access for these types of roles since they are not direct contributors to the development process. This would encourage and deepen the use of SMEs in the process and significantly streamline review cycles and project management, two of the biggest challenges for any team regardless of size. An ability to instantly add additional developers might also be helpful for larger teams that need to leverage contractors or offshore developers.

In short, what's required is an advanced, rapid authoring system that was designed to be used as groupware, not as an individual authoring tool. It's unlikely that any of the existing tools or solutions can be easily migrated in this direction. Individual authoring tools that are designed to run locally would need to be completely reengineered to run over a web server or as a clientserver application. LCMS vendors would need to completely revamp their entire authoring model. They would also need to dramatically streamline and simplify some of the more complex features, such as workflow and defect tracking. In both cases, there is significant work to be done. It seems more likely that new tools will emerge to fill this gap - tools that are explicitly engineered to be collaborative authoring solutions.

References

Arevolo De Azevedo Filho, Waldir, et al. "Hype Cycle for Corporate E-Learning, 2004." Gartner. 25 June 2004.
Bersin, Josh. "Making Rapid E-Learning Work." Chief Learning Officer (July 2005). Retrieved 3 December 2007.
Howard, Chris. "Learning Content Management Systems: What Works�." October 2005.
Howard, Chris. "LCMS - What Works" Slideshow (delivered at Learning 2006 in Orlando, November 2006).

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